To understand the benefits that our current Translink system offers to the city of Vancouver, we compared the Dissemination Areas’ distance from Skytrain lines to the DA’s reported median household incomes. A correlation between the two would indicate that the rapid transit’s presence positively impacts the economy nearby relative to areas that that are not in proximity to their services.
We attained the Vancouver city shape file and road data from the UBC Geography department and Dissemination Area data was acquired from Statistics Canada. Our analysis began with using ArcMap. The first step was to create a distance map from existing Skytrain lines. This was done using the Near tool.
Next, we took this data and used Spatial Statistics Tools > Modelling Spatial Relationships > Ordinary Least Squares to do a correlation analysis. The analytic of interest in this report is the p-value. This procedure of comparison returned a p-value of 0.00000, which is statistically significant. This score indicates that we can reject this analysis’ null hypothesis, which is that there is no correlation between the two variables of median household income and distance from existing transit lines.
The Ordinary Least Square analysis produced this rendering of its residuals. These indicate the Dissemination Areas that contain median household incomes that are either below, on par with, or above the expected value compared to the statistically relevant regression equation produced by ArcMap in generating the above report.
